After all the excitement, hype, and promises, Famo.us launched this week....sort of. They had yet another private, exclusive launch with a private, exclusive party while the pitiful 78,000 rest of us had to sign up for a hope to perhaps one day touch the Shroud of Turin. Ugh.

I'm even more confused now. I looked at their other repos and there is a smattering of information to be found in "Guides". None of the demo links work except for the mobile page that someone posted below.

There's nothing on the actual website except a login and when i register I'm "76882 in line".

If I try to access the documentation (http://famo.us/docs), I'm told I need to be a developer and I can't access it.

A resounding meh, I've wasted 10 minutes trying to work out how this thing works and what I can do with it. Some other kind folks have provided CodePen links, but back to work for me.

It's pure hypeware, after 3 years of development and 5+ millions in VC funding they cant set up a simple gh-page with a basic tutorial and example on launch day... Big backlash against this framework starts in 3,2,1...

Fail.

...for the rest of us real developers with real deadlines and a real need for real products, I'll stick with my Pixi.js, thank you very much!

Mashape is a popular aggregation service for finding and consuming public APIs. The process is simple: you browse their extensive list of public APIs and then "consume" the ones you like. It looked pretty cool so I decided to give it a try the other day. I signed up for a free account, and clicked the Explore APIs button to look for a service to consume:

I found a popular free weather service and then went to click on the "consume" button. That's when the trouble began... there is no consume button!...or add button, or like button, or energize button... (you get the point).

I finally broke down and decided to read their documentation on how to consume an API. Unfortunately, it just listed a bunch of curl commands I was already familiar with and oauth commands that my free weather service didn't require. Hmm... After floundering around a bit, I stumbled onto this screen which mocks me for not being able to consume an API and then gives me a link to "Consume an API"

At last, the holy grail I've been looking for! Oh wait, the link just takes me to the Browse API screen. Ugh, back to square one.

After much Internet searching and feeling like an idiot, I finally cracked the secret sauce: you have to test an API to consume it.

The other day I needed to un-protect a specific subfolder of a protected web directory. It took a bit of digging to figure out how to override an Apache .htaccess rule in a subfolder but I finally found the answer and thought I'd pass it along...

If you have a dual-boot machine with Linux and Windows and you update your Windows operating system, your machine will likely boot directly into Windows without giving you your familiar grub boot loader screen. You may panic and wonder if the Windows update wiped out your Linux installation but don't worry your Linux install is safe and sound -- it's just that Windows overwrote the MBR with its own boot loader and you need to re-install grub. Your initial reaction will be to use a Linux LiveCD and some terminal commands to restore grub but that often requires mounting the hard disk using a bunch of cryptic commands and even then it might not work if you have a RAID setup. Instead, I recommend you download and burn the Super Grub2 rescue CD (look for the Recommended download link) and then restart your machine to boot into it. The screens are a bit confusing but the overall process is really simple so I'll just walk you through it:

1. Use the up/down arrows on your keyboard to select the Everything option and hit the Enter key

2. The resulting screen will show all the versions of the Linux kernel that it found on your computer (don't worry if you see a bunch of entries in the list even if you only have one install of Linux)

3. Use the up/down arrows on your keyboard to select the highest Linux version in the list and then hit the Enter key

4. Your Linux instance should boot up - yay! Now, you need to restore your grub boot loader. To get the right command, open a terminal and run the following (note: this is a safe, read-only command that simply checks for the presence of RAID):